disSome of you may have seen this post last week:

https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/how_to_crash_systemd_in_one_tweet

I saw it I think shortly after it was posted to hacker news (aside: I read hacker news via it’s rss feed that has just the raw links and no comments or ratings, much nicer IMHO).

My first thought on reading it was “Did they report this upstream?” and upon some digging, yes they did ( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4234 ). It was filed the same time they posted their blog post/tweet (no responsible disclosure here). My next thought was to see if it worked, so I tried it on various of my test machines and it did not. Turns out you have to run it in a loop (as noted now in the blog and seen in the systemd issue). At that point I saw that there was a Fedora tracking bug, someone requested a CVE and there were patches proposed on the systemd issue (which has since been closed/fix merged), so I moved on with life.

Next someone posted the blog link to the fedora users list along with a rebuttal from a systemd maintainer: https://medium.com/@davidtstrauss/how-to-throw-a-tantrum-in-one-blog-post, and the discussion went downhill quickly from there. Finally, I saw a slashdot post today with the calm, journalistic title of Multiple Linux Distributions Affected By Crippling Bug In Systemd (which points to the blog post above that started all this).

So, everyone is flaming everyone else again about systemd, and I just don’t get it. My personal relationship with systemd is well within the range of all the other Open Source projects I use every day. Mostly I am happy with it, sometimes it has bugs and I report them, sometimes the project makes decisions I don’t like or agree with, sometimes the project doesn’t communicate as well with downstream as I would like (see fedora devel list post about systemd and TasksMax ), sometimes I have to learn (again) how to do what I want to do, sometimes it’s slow when I want it to be fast and so on. Would a local denial of service attack in another project have (re)opened such a bunch of flames? There was in fact just the day before the post a remote denial of service in bind (the most popular dns server out there). Did you even hear about it?

I just don’t get the passionate hatred systemd has. I guess perhaps I never will, and I guess thats ok. I would kindly ask those who do passionately dislike systemd to just move on to somewhere without it and leave the rest of us alone, but I don’t expect thats likely to happen. In the mean time if you have some technical problem with systemd, I will be happy to help you isolate it and file a bug or teach you how to do whatever you are trying to do with it, but I’m going to try and stay out of your flamewars.